Whoever designed ASP.NET 2.0 RadioButtonList controls needs to be drug out into the street and shot. When you populate RadioButtonList.Items using the property window, it brings up a nice little wizard for you to easily add. That's fine and dandy. It's even nice enough to duplicate the radiobutton.text into the radiobutton.value field for you. If you want a blank text field and just keep a hidden value, it won't let you. Even if you enter spaces in the little wizard for .text, it will use .value as the display.
I'm building a survey, and it's too much clutter if it appears as:
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
( ) Not at all Helpful ( ) Not Very Helpful ( ) Somewhat Helpful ( ) Very Helpful ( ) Not applicable
What I'm trying to do is
Not at all Helpful Not Very Helpful Somewhat Helpful Very Helpful Not applicable
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
Well, the spacing is off, but you see what I am getting at.
Thankfully, this can be circumvented by setting the radiobuttonlist to width="100%" and forcefeeding a text="" into the code for each radiobutton, and get the desired result.
I had to jump through this hoop because the selection array beforehand was written in plain HTML, and there are other ASP.NET controls on the page that trigger a postback. When the postback fires, the asp controls will preserve their data, but the HTML controls will chuck their contents into deep space, never to return. Can't have that happen while someone is in the middle of filling out a survey.
Sidenote, i'm working in Visual Studio 2005. We can't move up to 2008 until budget approval, and IT doesn't support it yet.